


weird twitter

by tigrrmilk



Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen, Other, parker is Big On Weird Twitter, that's it that's the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 00:26:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6448090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Parker has her own way of telling jokes.</p><p>(aka: the fic where parker is @dril)</p>
            </blockquote>





	weird twitter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inanna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inanna/gifts).



**@dril**   _Mar 28_  
gonna fill up on milk shakes and do some open carry off the grid

 

 

 

\---

 

Hardison will tell you that the buck stops with Nate. If Nate understood the problem he’d lay the blame on Hardison. Sophie’s just glad that Parker’s worked out a good way to connect with strangers online. Eliot thinks the whole thing’s stupid (and hilarious, although he won’t admit that to Hardison).

It all started when Nate decided that the best way to take down a corrupt, bullying comedian was to steal a comedy festival.

 

\---

 

“You love your stupid van, Hardison,” Eliot says. Parker is plaiting his hair and he’s glaring at the rest of them with extra vigour as if to prove that he doesn’t care about it. But Hardison’s seen Eliot brushing his hand against the plaits when he thinks nobody’s looking, a little smile on his face. Hardison _knows_.

“Come on,” Hardison says. “Lucille is great, I’m not saying she isn’t, but why do you get to be in the contest and I have to sit out here alone!”

Eliot growls. “You know what I’m saying!” Hardison says. “I could win this thing, you know I could. He doesn’t even know any jokes!”

“Well, maybe he’ll learn some,” Sophie says.

“You could always feed some to him,” Nate says, and taps his earbud.

“I am not giving him _any_ of _my material_ ,” Hardison says, flatly. “Nuh-uh.”

“I don’t need your jokes,” Eliot says. “I’m hilarious.” He says it angrily, as if daring anyone to disagree with him.

Nobody disagrees with him. Life’s short enough, Hardison thinks. No need to hasten its end by pointing out to Eliot that he wouldn’t know a joke if it punched him in the face.

 

\---

 

“You’re saying Eliot needs to win this thing?” Hardison says. “I don’t think I can hack that, man. They need to laugh at him more.”

“They’re not laughing _at_ me, Hardison,” Eliot says. “Weren’t you even listening? They’re laughing _with_ me, that’s what comedy is all about.”

Hardison runs a hand down his face. “I’m writing jokes!” Parker says. She’s spent the day in a workshop that the mark’s long-suffering comedy partner has been running. “Do you want to hear one? Maybe Eliot can use it.”

The joke is five minutes long. There’s no punchline. “Uh,” Hardison says.

“I can’t use that,” Eliot says, but... is he _giggling_? That’s just disturbing. “It’s too long, Parker. The whole set’s only got five minutes.” Hardison bristles. He already tried to give Eliot one of his best jokes after Sophie spent a while convincing him to, and Eliot had turned it down for not being funny enough. It was plenty funny.

“Oh, sure,” he says. “I see how it is. You laugh at _her_. That’s just hurtful, man.”

 

\---

 

Parker starts carrying around a notebook after the comedy festival. It’s got glittery blue giraffes on the cover. She steals a lot of pens to write in it with, which she leaves behind her like a trail. Which would be useful for Hardison if he ever decided to start writing things down by hand.

“What are you writing?” He says to her over breakfast, a week after the job. She squints at him but doesn’t answer until she’s finished.

“Jokes,” she says. “This is my joke book.”

Eliot’s flipping pancakes. He laughs to himself. “Maybe I should write one of those.”

“For the last time,” Hardison says to him. “You only won because I hacked the sound system and played canned laughter through it! They were laughing at Seinfeld, man.”

Eliot points at him with the spatula. “That crowd was laughing _with_ me the whole time, and you know it.”

“You know, I was there,” Sophie says, thoughtfully, as she stirs her coffee. “I think they were... scared. Nervous laughter.” She sighs. “I do miss the stage... you learn these things.”

Eliot glares at her.

“No, no,” Hardison says. “I’m sure you were -- demure and charming onstage...”

Parker goes back to her notebook. She pulls a pen out from where it’s tangled in her hair and writes with it.

 

\---

 

Hardison can’t quite get used to Parker’s jokes. Well, it’s not the jokes that are really the problem -- it’s more that she can’t stop telling them at inappropriate times.

“Parker,” he says. “Parker, I’m dangling halfway down a skyscraper, I swear it’s taller than that actual mountain we climbed -- you said you’d be here with me, girl, and you are not, so don’t you dare try and tell me a joke right now.”

She says “Okay,” in a small voice, and Hardison feels bad with the part of him that isn’t already taken over by abject terror.

“I’m sorry baby, but -- can someone get me down from here? Has anyone found Eliot yet? Did he fall in the lake?”

There’s a growl on the line in answer. “Good,” Hardison says. He swallows. He really is a long way up.

 

\---

 

Parker’s twirling a straw between her fingers. There’s a tiny tsunami inside her glass of Pepsi. “I don’t think I want to do what Eliot did,” she says. “Stand up. Onstage.”

“It was _barely_ stand-up, did you hear any jokes? I mean, he was _standing-up_ ,” Hardison says, and waves Eliot off when he tries to interrupt. “It’s not always about you, man.”

“Stop talking about me then,” Eliot says, and stalks away in the direction of something that smells delicious.

“You can do other things with your jokes,” Hardison says. “You could... hell, you could tweet them.” He gets his phone out and shows her his feed. It’s full of jokes.

“Hmm,” she says, and takes the phone off him. She scrolls back through his feed for a long time. “I don’t get most of these,” she says, but then she finds one account that she likes and she can’t stop laughing at it.

By the next day, he’s got her a phone just for Twitter. “I’m not telling you my username,” she says, once she’s set it up. “You didn’t appreciate my jokes properly.”

“I like your jokes,” Hardison says. “Just not when I’m upside down, three hundred feet in the air!”

The only person she’ll happily tell her username to is Eliot, who doesn’t hold with twitter being a thing that exists. “Just make sure nobody can track you from it,” he says, gruffly.

 

\---

 

After that, Hardison doesn’t think about it much for a long time. Sure, sometimes he finds Parker on the phone... at night, when she can’t sleep. While she’s eating breakfast. She’s always typing something out, concentrating hard. She doesn’t spend much time reading her feed, which seems like a shame to Hardison. But then maybe she doesn’t really follow anyone.

He asks her about it once. She chews viciously on her cereal and then says, “I follow some people with the same sense of humour as me.”

Hardison sometimes regrets that he hadn’t been more receptive to that first joke. He’s curious, but not curious enough to breach her trust and work out what her account is. He could totally do that. It wouldn’t be hard. But it wouldn’t be right, either.

 

\---

 

They’re on a date somewhere in the Cascades, star-gazing, the next time it comes up. Hardison takes some photos of the sky and sends one to Eliot, just to prove that he’s outdoors on purpose. Eliot texts back immediately.

            Fake

Hardison sighs, and looks pleadingly to Parker. “Let’s selfie this,” he says. She shakes her head, and he nods and takes one of just himself against the sky. The Milky Way is visible. Parker has a big box of donuts that she’s eating, and she’s building a new harness from various parts between bites.

Hardison texts the selfie to Eliot, and then opens up twitter to tweet the sky photos. It’s fine; there’s no way anyone can trace the account to him. Parker looks over and furrows her brow. “Twitter,” she says.

“Yeah,” Hardison says. “You never tweet photos?”

“Just jokes,” she says. She lets the harness drop and she twists her hands. “I like the jokes,” she says. “There are still times when people laugh and I don’t understand why. At the workshop, the comedian told me that it’s all about structure. It’s about what people expect. They think you’ll do one thing, and then you set them on fire instead!” She pauses for a long moment. “I like him. I still think we should have found him a new partner.”

“Hey, we made sure he got the festival,” Hardison says. “He can find his own partner. You can’t force that chemistry.”

“It’s like a con,” Parker says. “You line everything up, and then when your audience is there, ready for everything to fall into place...”

She throws a donut at Hardison’s face and he almost doesn’t catch it. “Whoa,” he says. But then he eats it.

“You do the wrong thing,” she says. “Only you know it’s the right thing. It’s _funny_. That's what funny means. It's a good surprise!"

“So you’re still writing jokes, huh?”

She smiles and picks the harness up. Hardison looks down at his phone. There are two new texts from Eliot.

            Where is ur coat.

            Don’t ignore me

Hardison takes a photo of his coat, spread out beneath him like a blanket, and texts it to Eliot. Then he tilts his head back and looks up at the sky. His phone buzzes again.

            Stop texting me, I don’t care

Then again, almost immediately.

            I packed some porter in your bag. Goes well with campfire food.

Hardison already found it, but he hadn’t opened it yet. He pops the lid off two bottles and hands one to Parker. “Want to make a bonfire?” He asks.

Of course she does.

 

\---

 

The next time it comes up, Hardison _really_ wasn’t prepared for it. “Try it again,” Eliot says, audibly trying to keep the frustration from his voice. “You can do this, Hardison.”

His hands are ziptied tight, curled together around the back of his chair. “You should be looking for Parker,” Hardison says. He can feel hysteria bubbling in his stomach. He knows that Eliot’s almost here, but he also knows that the bad dudes have Parker too, and she’s not on coms --

“Parker’s fine,” Eliot says, and then Hardison hears a loud crack and thump outside, and Eliot’s in the doorway. Eliot sighs and then cuts his hands free.

"You need to be able to get yourself out," he says. "We're practicing this at home."

“Buy me dinner first,” Hardison says, weakly. “Where’s Parker.”

“I don’t know,” Eliot says, but he’s looking up at the ceiling.

“You said she was fine!” Hardison says.

“She’s tweeting her jokes,” Eliot says, impatiently. Hardison didn’t even know that Eliot knew he could get apps on his phone, but he pulls it from his pocket and waves it in Hardison’s face. He takes the phone from him and looks.

Eliot has a locked shell account. It follows two people: Hardison’s main account, which he has never told Eliot about, naturally. And...

“Hang on,” Hardison says. His brain short-circuits. “Hang on.”

“No,” Eliot says, and beats up like three guys who had come for them.

“Hang on,” Hardison says, again. “Parker is [_@dril_?](https://twitter.com/dril)”

“That’s Parker’s account,” Eliot says, because he _doesn’t get it_. “Let’s go get her.”

“Sure, sure,” Hardison says. He gives Eliot back his phone. “Sure, yeah. Let’s go rescue @dril.”

 

\---

 

“Are you annoyed that Parker has more followers than you?” Sophie asks, in her best condescending, I’m-talking-to-a-baby voice.

“I don’t know how many followers I have,” Parker says. She’s dangling from the ceiling in a new harness, tugging on individual straps to make sure that they’re strong enough. “I don’t want anyone to follow me.”

“No,” Hardison says. He feels dazed. “I’m not annoyed, it’s just --”

He looks at Eliot, appealing, although he knows that it’s a lost cause already. “Come on man. It’s like... it’s like if you found out I was assassin number one.”

“Doesn’t work like that,” Eliot says. His arms are crossed. He looks away.

Hardison starts to read out some of @dril’s tweets, unable to keep the wonder from his voice.

 

 

> **@dril** big bird was obviously just a man in a suit. but the other ones were too small to contain men. so what the fuck

> **@dril** IF THE ZOO BANS ME FOR HOLLERING AT THE ANIMALS I WILL FACE GOD AND WALK BACKWARDS INTO HELL

 

Parker laughs, softly, from the ceiling.

“How did I miss this,” Hardison says, mostly to himself.

“You ain’t very observant,” Eliot says. “Always said that about you.”

 

 

> **@dril** why even bother learning how to hack when i can just have my enemies accounts removed by accusing them of conspiring to piss on grumpy cat
> 
>  

“That’s just rude,” Hardison says.

 

\---

 

 

“I just, it’s a betrayal,” Hardison says. “You’re famous, Parker, and you never told me!”

She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t think you know what _famous_ means.”

“Stop talking,” Eliot says. Somebody landed a lucky punch on his nose and he’s pitched forward while he waits for it to stop bleeding. Bruises are blooming around his eyes. “Parker, have you got this?”

“Once Hardison shuts off the motion sensors,” she says. She throws her phone at him. “Use mine.” She leans into Eliot, gently. “Would a joke make you feel better?”

He makes a few noises like he’s trying to work out how he can say yes without just saying _yes_. “Fine,” he says, finally. But he smiles at her and wipes the blood from his face.

Hardison shakes his head and gets to work.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> various people encouraged me to write this on twitter/tumblr. it's all your fault.
> 
>  
> 
> [come and yell with me about leverage!!](http://alwaysalreadyangry.tumblr.com/)


End file.
